“Nope, nothing like it,” says the source. It’ll be “a regular looking office building tower over 20 stories high.” Though it doesn’t appear to take up the whole block: “I’m assuming there are going to be purdy trees and green stuff around it.” Employees were shown a rendering of the tower at a recent meeting, says the source, but it was quickly removed from the company’s online newsletter: “I guess because they didn’t want it out there.”

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This was the rendering from Munoz + Albin that fueled speculation it would be Hilcorp’s new home base. The firm later said the rendering was never “a real project.”

The entity connected to Hilcorp, 1110 Main Partners, owns 2 consecutive blocks bound by Main, Travis, Dallas, and Lamar — that’s about 128,000 sq. ft. of Downtown property, which includes the 65,000-sq.-ft. former Foley’s building, designed by Kenneth Franzheim, and its 31,000 sq.-ft. parking garage. The Foley’s opened here on Main St. in 1947. No date has been set yet for demolition.

8 Comment

There’s enough unrevealed downtown office tower renderings floating around right now to fill a mid-sized city.

Hopefully Hilcorp is just waiting to surprise us all with their modest yet understatedly daring architecture, and a green plaza that engages with Main Street, forming an innovative linkage between the public and private realms.

This is starting to sound like a rewrite of that 1960s song about “little boxes on the hillside” depicting South San Fransico housing. We can change the words to
“Little boxes in our downtown,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes in our downtown,
Little boxes all the same,
There’s a gray one and a green one
And a silver one and a black one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”